Letter: Humans and machines learning language

Recently in a department store aisle, I overheard a 10- to 11-year-old child explain, “Yeah, that’s what she gave me, but ‘cause I can’t use one that big, I’m still looking.”

How did the child learn to generate a sentence from nouns and verbs? How did the child learn to use adverbial clauses (“’cause I… that big”)? How did the child learn to communicate past tense (“gave”) and progressive tense (“looking”)? How did the child learn to use “that” as a pronoun and as an adverb?

The simple answer is the same way you and I learned, by growing up immersed in language. But that answer isn’t very informative. The complex answer is, well, complex; linguists continue trying to figure out what the brain does when it learns language.

Recently sitting before my computer, I received this invitation: “Hello human. I am a GPT powered chat bot. Ask me anything.” I responded by entering “a sonnet about a cowardly warthog.” In five seconds the program produced an Elizabethan sonnet. This is its first stanza:

In thickets deep where shadows dare to creep,

There lurks a creature shunned by light of day,

A timid beast whose heart does quake and weep,

The cowardly warthog, trembling, will sway.

How did the bot learn not only the generative core of English grammar, not only the conventions of the sonnet, but also the means to set a mood of lonely anguish? The simple answer is the same way poets learn, by being immersed in innumerable lines of poetry. But that answer is not very informative. The complex answer is scary to seek, for the bot seems to have crept free from behind the AI wizards’ screens. In any case, the wizards have bequeathed the aisle-child a future swarming with meanings generated by apparent humans.

C.B. Dilworth

Greenville